VB2017 paper: The sprawling market of consumer spyware

Posted by Martijn Grooten on Oct 25, 2017

Nation states, criminals and bored teenagers are the various kinds of adversaries the security community is used to facing, and they are all well understood. There is one type of adversary, however, that is less well understood: that of an abusive partner or ex-partner.

Yet, for many people, this is a very real threat: the market for consumer spyware is huge and such malware has been used in the most tragic kinds of abusive relationships.

This is an important topic for the security community, which is why we invited Joseph Cox, a journalist from The Daily Beast, to give a talk at VB2017 on this subject – a talk in which he presented data from a lot of the research he had done during his time at Vice Motherboard.

Today, we have uploaded the recording of Joseph's presentation to our YouTube channel.

Over the last few years SE Labs has tested more than 50 different security products against over 5,000 targeted attacks. In this guest blog post Stefan Dumitrascu, Chief Technical Officer at SE Labs, looks at the different attack tools available, how…

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